[mikasjoman]

I don't see any difference between a mailfunctioning piece of software creating serious harm to that of a crashing bridge. They can both kill, create huge social disturbance and leave people ruined. The problem is that the field still largely just thinks of them as bugs when it comes to software. That we have an abundance of programmers not taking software engineering as serious as the mechanical engineer is a huge problem today. When someone gets hurt from a bug, the software engineer mostly gets away with it (or get a reprimand from the boss) and doesn't get his/her licence to write professional code away. To be honest, what we would need is a professional certification where the software engineer should at random be required by law to be audited about his/her code and potentially be forbidden to work with some type of projects if it doesn't pass. I have seen way too many nasty outcomes and suffering during my career in the industry to hold any other opinion. We have real software engineers out there who write clean, rigid & maintainable code - but the industry is flushed with hobby tinkerers allowed to work on projects that can result in serious harm. Calling oneself a software engineer should be regulated, audited like any other engineering field. That we don't require it, leaves us with the nasty results that is an ongoing disaster. Anyone can write a piece of software, the way anyone can build a bridge. Ensuring neither of them come crashing down and adhering to principles and practices that doesn't make it come crashing down with high certainty is what's makes engineers different. If you have read the book "structures - or why things didn't fall down", you know that those other engineers from other fields also fail on and off. The difference is that in software we just keep building the next bridge go come falling down when the previous broke.